So we bought a pair of jeans yesterday, and when we got home last night we found this written on the inside. It's not unheard of for help messages from sweatshop laborers in foreign countries to be ...

In English, in the middle of a sentence if data is being left blank (such as an unknown date, or a name to be filled in at a later time), commonly you see ???, ___ (underscore(s)), or -- to mark this. ...

I've looked for this question on the site but can't seem to find it. I'm interested in learning Chinese, well, Cantonese specifically, and I want to focus on both the written and spoken components. ...

The entrance examination for universities in mainland China includes a Chinese section. I'm looking for three things about this.
1) A source for questions that have been asked in previous years. For ...

I have some troubles in distinguishing written characters 曰 yuē (to speak) and 日 rì (sun). Although they singularly look different on computers (maybe yuē look a bit wider, while rì is taller), I find ...

Many government positions in Taiwan have typing speed requirements. In Taipei city job announcements I've found which mention this requirement, the minimum runs from 40-60 characters a minute. This ...

I am experimenting with an online seal generator, the text I have entered is 一千五百 and I have noticed that the characters go first from top right to bottom right, then from bottom left to top left. Is ...

Is it possible to use a Braille keyboard to input chinese with the pinyin input method? How could a blind user ever be able to choose the right character combination if they cannot see it?
The words ...

This one question is similar, but doesn't quite answer what I am asking here.
If I have a name + title (as in 张老师) how would the underlining work? Would I have to underline the whole word ("张老师") or ...

This is hopefully a fun question that is a little bit off the standard path. It's meant to elicit a light conversation but nevertheless one that illuminates fundamental characteristics of Chinese as a ...

I have checked a number of websites, and although most agree about the main countries that use traditional and simplified Chinese, I am not sure about countries where there are mixed populations of ...

Many languages have uppercase and lowercase forms. English for example has lowercase a and uppercase A. Letters written in uppercase are known as being capitalized. Chinese, also, does have a form of ...

Are there good resources for learning Chinese from the ground up with a bias torwards reading and not speaking. For me the ability to read would be much more useful. Pronunciation is the hardest part ...

Is anyone willing to help me edit this monologue for grammatical errors? If so, I would really appreciate it. I have also included the pinyin in case it helps to understand what I meant. I have chosen ...

Most Chinese characters have two parts, a radical and a phonetic. So different ways to simplify them might include the following:
1) Simplify the radical, retain the phonetic. Example: 调
2) Simplify ...

Most people will say it is because there are too many homonyms in the Chinese language. But when I realize that homonyms do not bother people very much in oral communications, I begin to question this ...

I just started to learn Chinese a few years ago but I find essay-writing especially difficult. For example, the following essay took me about 45 minutes to an hour and I was told that it had poor word ...

For example, in written Chinese 给 is used a ideograph for "to give" and is read with whatever the word for "to give" is in the various languages, even if the word is not cognate or in any way related ...

Aside from the standard printing style of Chinese (what is referred to in this wikipedia article as regular script), what are the main styles that are in modern use?
When looking at different styles ...

When using a laptop touchpad to input Chinese via handwriting on Windows 8, I either have to double tap or press down in order to write. On a MacBook, I just write without needing an initial double ...

I believe in Taiwan people use traditional Chinese characters for writing whereas in China they use simplified characters. Assuming this information is correct I'd like to kindly request suggestions ...

In English it perfectly fine in a business context and for someone you have never met before to use Dear XXXX at the beginning of a letter or email.
This causes some difficulty when moving to another ...

Recently, my wife has been learning to program JavaScript using Codecademy. I like how it walks people through exercises step by step, and builds up concepts, etc. All the marking is automated, and ...

When analyzing Chinese speeches or essays, I often have difficulty understanding how their the authors organized their ideas.
In North America, for example, a common template for writing an essay is ...